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In the Dordogne, Canoeing Into Prehistory

On the Vézère River, passing the 15th-century Château de Belcayre.Credit
Ed Alcock for The New York Times

FAR below the clifftop terrace where we were savoring a wild boar stew, the Vézère River curved silky and dark under a steep cliff, carrying three canoes and a kayak. The paddlers passed smoothly over the water, around a bend and out of sight. Reports had been right — the canoeing would be good here in the Dordogne, an area in Aquitaine where the rivers have invited exploration and settlement since the days of the Neanderthals.

My wife, Sue, and I were dining at the Auberge de Castel-Merle, a small hotel atop a limestone knob that once held a castle of the Knights Templar — and the base we had chosen for the first few days of our trip. The auberge overlooks the Vézère and the tiny medieval village of Sergeac in a landscape that harbors hundreds of caves and overhanging rock shelters. Within them are the prehistoric creations for which the Dordogne is known: paintings and engravings of bison, reindeer and other animals made by people who lived 10,000 to 45,000 years ago.

On this evening, light struck the 12th-century fortified church of Sergeac and the wheat, bean fields and grazing cattle on the rich flood plain across the river. Beyond rose hills covered with green oak and pine, habitat for wild boar, truffles and nightingales.

After the glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice age, this valley was a cold, dry steppe where reindeer, bison and horses grazed. Among the predators hunting them were humans who were probably the direct ancestors of many Europeans. Like others before us, we had come to the Dordogne hoping to grasp the moment when the light of full-spectrum human awareness blinked on, manifesting itself in a tangible, viewable record. The rivers promised to provide the fastest and best route to the region’s character.

Fortunately, the French penchant for plein air has made paddling as easy in the Dordogne as on the Delaware. Rentals of canoes, kayaks and equipment seemed to be available at almost every bridge crossing, and outfitters were ready with the shuttles we would need to keep us connected with our rental car.

We had paid extra airfare to take our folding Pakboat canoe with us from our home in Vermont, but the boat missed the connection in Philadelphia, so we rented a canoe from an outfitter called Aventure Plein Air. After our first night at Castel-Merle, a shuttle conveyed us to an embarkation point several miles upstream on the Vézère, and we set out. The outfitter also provides guides, but we preferred to make our own way.

We had arrived in July for this trip last year, missing the months just before, when high water is most reliable. But it was a good summer for rain, and a swollen current rushed us through the village of Montignac, past narrow medieval lanes and foie gras shops, and then beneath the nearby hill of Lascaux, which has been called the Sistine Chapel of the Upper Paleolithic because of its famous cave paintings, 15,000 to 17,000 years old. It is more than a mile above the river, and visitors are restricted to a reproduction of the cave’s most striking chambers. We swept on past. Though many visitors are as moved by the facsimile as the original and it deserves a visit, our goal for this trip was to encounter the seam where land and art were joined, so the river held us in its grip for now.

The river carried us under overhanging grottoes gouged out of limestone by the current; the 16th-century Château de Losse sits on top of one of them. Gardens of ferns and mosses dangled from their ceilings, and swifts darted in and out. On the river, black kites swooped overhead, and anglers fished for pike.

The overhanging grottoes were our first sign of the caves and natural rock shelters that fostered and preserved this region’s outpouring of prehistoric art, which has long fascinated archaeologists. A recent theory, promoted by Jean Clottes, a godfather of French prehistoric studies, and David Lewis-Williams, a South African expert in the region’s rock art, is that its creation was the province of shamans who often painted in ecstatic trance states and for whom the caves and shelters were portals to the underworld. Others believe that the theory explains only one of many reasons that, over a period of more than 30,000 years, people decorated the caves.

When we had paddled our way back to the stretch of the Vézère below Castel-Merle, we pulled out our canoe at the boat landing in Sergeac and walked a few minutes to a narrow vallon, a small side canyon. Students were working under a shed roof, excavating a thin layer of a floor 33,000 years old in a rock shelter called Abri Castanet.

Abri means shelter in French, and this vallon, about 100 yards across and 300 yards long, has at the bases of its cliffs a dozen such shelters, containing some of the oldest known carvings and paintings, as well as cruder artifacts going much further back. Marcel Castanet, the first excavator at this spot, is the source of the name for Abri Castanet. His descendants still own the land — and Castel-Merle — and his son, René, runs a small museum of prehistory in Sergeac. René’s granddaughter, Isabelle Castanet-Daumas, an archaeologist, owns the vallon and offers tours of its rock shelters.

In a Quonset hut beside Abri Castanet, Dr. Randall White, a professor of anthropology at New York University, was excavating refuse from a 33,000-year-old bead workshop. He picked through bead-making residue with a pair of tweezers, separating tiny shards of hematite, used for polishing, from equally minuscule scraps of the charred reindeer antler and bone. The beads themselves were made of mammoth ivory and soapstone, materials prized apparently for their smoothness. Behind him, students uncovered a section of the ancient floor with brushes. “We’re picking through the garbage of everyday life 33,000 years ago,” he said, holding up the tiny ulna of a prehistoric bird or rodent.

The nomadic hunters called the Cro-Magnon, who were, like us, Homo sapiens, existed here from about 40,000 to 10,000 years ago, and wintered in the vallon sporadically over that time. The canyon sheltered them from cold winds, and the natural rock overhangs allowed them to hold heat inside by hanging hides over the openings of their shelters. It is thought that different groups met in those cold months and shared materials, techniques and genes before separating to go to their summer hunting grounds in the spring.

Their own ancestors had come to Dordogne from Africa, taking thousands of years to get there only to find another human species already in residence — the Neanderthal.

Professor White believes that the shock of that contact was an impetus for the Cro-Magnon use of body ornamentation. “Ornamentation helped them organize into large groups and identify each other across wide distances,” he said. Their distinctive styles of beadwork and clothing made them identifiable as Cro-Magnon and differentiated them from the Neanderthals. In this view, ornamentation was not only the beginning of metaphor — the taking of an image or material out of one context and placing it in another — but also of the concept of social status. Abri Castanet is one of the richest sources of concrete evidence for ornamentation, though earlier so-called “find spots” exist in France and South Africa.

From the vallon we followed a centuries-old trail under the overhanging cliffs and through oak forests along the river for almost a mile, to the next village, St.-Léon-sur-Vézère, and back to Castel-Merle. Here the wild surroundings made it possible to imagine the landscape as a preagricultural refuge for early humans, if not as the dry grassland that once existed here.

The next day we paddled on downstream. The valley narrowed under limestone cliffs, called falaises, that have yielded evidence of human occupation from the 19th century back 400,000 years to the early days of the Neanderthals. Only a millennium or so before our own era, villages with stone churches and battlements began to be built into some of these cliff walls: in the eighth and ninth centuries residents took to the rocks to evade riverborne Viking raids, and in the 15th century, peasants took refuge there from the English during the Hundred Years’ War. Two of these sites open to tourists are La Roque St.-Christophe and La Madeleine.

We ended our Vézère paddle at Les Eyzies-de-Tayac. It was late in the day, and we left to spend a final night at Castel-Merle, but in the morning we were back at Les Eyzies. The epicenter of prehistoric France, it is the site of the shelter called Cro-Magnon, where the first Upper Paleolithic remains were identified in the 19th century and were given the Cro-Magnon name.

The comprehensive National Museum of Prehistory, one of the finest of its kind in the world, is there now. It sits under one of the overhanging cliffs surrounding the village and looks down on the river and the touristy streets of Les Eyzies. Inside are vast collections of stone tools found in the region, along with carvings extracted from caves and shelters — including a carving of a vulva discovered two years ago at Abri Castanet — and many of the most beautiful examples of portable art carved in limestone, bone and antler. Its exhibits on the glaciation of Dordogne, and films demonstrating toolmaking techniques from various eras, bring the prehistoric period alive.

From the museum we drove our rental outside town to Font-de-Gaume cave, one of the earliest decorated caves explored in the 19th century. Open to the public, it is, like many caves in the area, operated by the French Ministry of Culture, and visits are kept brief and strictly controlled to protect the art.

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The two gaping portals of its dramatic entrance look down on another tributary canyon of the Vézère, and we followed the guide down the single narrow passage to paintings of mammoths, bison and horses and to a famous and graceful portrait, 14,000 years old, of a male and female reindeer — an animal rarely depicted in the caves despite being the Cro-Magnons’ main food species. The reproduction of this painting in 1901 by Abbé Henri Breuil, a great cave explorer and theoretician, helped popularize Paleolithic art and sparked its influence on modern painting.

Our Pakboat had now arrived, and on the next leg of our trip we drove to the medieval market town of Sarlat-la-Canéda, put the boat into the Dordogne River and canoed a scenic stretch that has no prehistoric sites but attracts armadas of paddlers with its imposing castles, clear waters and cliffside villages. Debarking at Beynac, where Richard the Lionhearted stayed during one of his periods of exile from England, we reclaimed our car and went south for two hours to the Célé River.

I HAD heard about the Célé from Jim Walker, a Vermont canoe outfitter, who told me the landscape was wilder than that along the Vézère and closer to something the prehistoric cave painters might have known. The river runs southwest into the upper Lot River, near Cahors, through the high karst plateaus and deep, narrow valleys of the Causses du Quercy, now a designated natural area of almost half a million acres. Many of its remote villages are connected by hiking trails, and its inky, deep Cahors wines were the preferred appellation for British import in the days of Eleanor of Aquitaine.

For three days we followed the Célé under 1,500-foot falaises pocked with caves and shelters, some containing Paleolithic carvings and paintings. (They are closed to the public.) The valley, not quite narrow enough to be called a canyon, would have made a natural funnel for prey species, with plenty of places for prehistoric hunters to ambush them. As a canoeing river, the Célé is swifter and more engaging than the Vézère or Dordogne, with sporty Class 1 mini-rapids and only occasional portages of a few dozen feet around old dams or bridges.

At the end of each day on the Célé, we landed in villages under steep canyon walls, left our canoe on shore and carried our things to a pension or hotel. A noted trout stream, the Célé preserves the hours before 11 a.m. and after 6 p.m. for anglers, but the villages were spaced so that we never suffered from the late start and could linger politely at breakfast over coffee and conversation.

On the last morning, we left our hotel in Cabrerets and climbed half a mile out of the village to Pech Merle cave. From the trail, another narrow side canyon opened to view as we rose through scrubby oak woods with caves and shelters visible in the opposing cliffs.

Pech Merle, open to the public and operated by the Ministry of Culture, contains all the archetypes of Upper Paleolithic European art — charcoal drawings of horses, reindeer, mammoths and a rare “wounded man” that many interpret as a trancing shaman. We saw children’s footprints left 25,000 years ago and preserved in hardened clay on the cave floor.

Most riveting were the “twin horses,” two life-size horses painted in black and dull rust with heavy outlines and facing in opposite directions, one behind the other, their transparent hindquarters arranged in convincing perspective and their equine forms wedded to the rock’s natural shapes. They have been on a freestanding boulder in this cave for 26,000 years.

Large spots made by artists who painted the palms of their hands and then slapped them onto the rock, and negative handprints made by blowing pigment over the hand and onto the rock, made the horses shimmer with life. A spectral fish, probably a pike, was superimposed over the horses like a Chagall angel, fusing the ephemeral with the substantial.

It was hard to view this painting as primitive. We came out into the sunlight seeing the world differently, and made our way, blinking and speechless, back down the trail to the river.

LIMESTONE CAVES AND ANCIENT ART

To reach the canoeing rivers and the caves of the Dordogne region, take a train from Paris to a regional town such as Brive-la-Gaillard, on the upper Vézère River, and rent a car.

Water levels for paddling are most dependable in May and June, especially on the Célé, though summer rains can bring good levels much later. Among the outfitters that rent boats on the Vézère is Aventure Plein Air, St.-Léon-sur-Vézère (33-5-53-50-67-71; www.canoevezere.com), which charges 50 euros, about $70 at $1.39 to the euro, for a two-person canoe from Montignac to Les Eyzies, including shuttle, and less for shorter legs. Some outfitters also provide shuttles and guided archaeological tours.

BattenKill Canoe (800-421-5268;www.battenkill.com), in Arlington, Vt., runs trips in June that include canoeing on the Vézère, Dordogne and Célé Rivers, as well as visits to caves with prehistoric art; $2,769 a person.

Of the several privately and publicly operated caves on the Vézère containing prehistoric art, most limit access and require reservations. The most famous, the Cave of Lascaux in Montignac, containing several chambers with 16,000-year-old images of animals painted on their walls, is now closed to the public to preserve the art, but Lascaux II, a replica of two of the cave halls, was opened in 1983 near the original and is a favorite tourist site. The fee is 8.50 euros; the hours fluctuate from month to month, but usually run from 9 or 9:30 a.m. to 6 or 6:30 p.m. (closed January and early February; 33-5-53-51-95-03; www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/lascaux/en).

The Musée National de Préhistoire (33-5-53-06-45-45; www.musee-prehistoire-eyzies.fr), above the Cro-Magnon cave in Les Eyzies, looks down on the village and the Vézère River from high on the cliff. It houses magnificent prehistoric art and artifacts, vast collections of exquisitely varied stone tools and filmed demonstrations of the techniques that were used to create them. Open daily except most Tuesdays, 9:30 to 6:30, 5 euros a person.

Pech Merle cave, outside Cabrerets, is open April to November, every day at 9: 30 a.m. at a cost of 7.50 euros for adults. The last tour begins at 5 p.m. Visitors are limited to 700 per day, so reservations are recommended (33-05-65-31-27-05; www.quercy.net/pechmerle).

The Auberge de Castel-Merle in Sergeac (33-5-53-50-70-08; www.hotelcastelmerle.com) has half-board rate, including continental breakfast and a dinner of the proprietor and chef Christopher Millinship’s traditional regional cuisine, of 100 to 108 euros for two. At Castel-Merle you can also book a visit to René Castanet’s Museum of Castel-Merle in Sergeac, where donations are accepted, and the Prehistoric Site of Castel-Merle and its rock shelters (33-5-53-50-79-70).

On the Célé, the pension Les Tilleuls, under high cliffs in the village of Marcilhac (33-5-65-40-62-68) has high-ceilinged rooms and a sumptuous continental breakfast. Doubles start at 45 euros.